Electric car highways 🇦🇺, full-body VR, and 3D-printed… Earables? 👂

This week we’re talking about full-body VR wearables, human organ factories in New Hampshire, the largest electric vehicle highway in Australia 🛣️⚡, and [w]earables that go into… your ear. 👂

WEARABLES + VR . 

True whole-body tracking now possible in VR 🏃🕹
Animation Magazine threw out some major +1’s this past week to a company called OptiTrack. They said “OptiTrack has delivered the ‘missing links’ for arcade VR with two key advancements”. What are they? They have developed easily attachable, light-weight pucks that can be attached to VR user’s hands and feet. This allows for a much more high quality tracking of a user’s body movements. The feature includes allowing users to peek around corners.
The second advancement is better calibration. Capture and track systems for the past 30 years have required a ‘wand wave’ action to calibrate their movements with the system. The OptiTrack’s system instead allows for continous calibration, no more initial set up required. Their VR experience is now just plug and play.

TRANSPORTATION .

One of the longest electric car highways, underway 🛣️⚡
Australia’s state of Queensland announced this past week they will build one of the world’s longest electric vehicle highways… within the next 6 months. The highway will have 18 stations, and even offer free power for at least one year to encourage consumers to switch to electric cars. The distance is comparable to the United States’ “west coast electric highway” spanning from California, Oregon, to Washington state.
The $3m network seems like a worthwhile investment. More than half of Australians surveyed said that improvements to public infrastructure would be an important factor in buying electric. The move is also good for other reasons… Queensland is the biggest carbon polluter in Australia, with cars responsible for nearly half of the emissions.

HEALTH .

New Hampshire, the state of manufactured organ-building? ⚕️
This past week was the official public launch of BioFabUSA, a public-private partnership to start… organ-building factories. The organizer for the event was ARMI, the Advanced Regenerative Manufacturing Institute. ARMI received $80 million in DoD funding this past December to scale-up manufacturing of human organs. One point to note here, the sheer size in funding. They have since secured an additional $214 million in funding. A major challenge has been taking the innovations from the laboratory and bringing them to mass-scale production.
The BioFABUSA partnership seems like it will be key to accomplishing this commercialization. The Governor of New Hampshire has called it “the birth of an entire new industry”. It’s expected that this new industry will grow to $67.6 billion by 2020.

[W]EARABLE .

3D-printed wearables for your ear 👂⚕️
The “Earable” is a 3D-printed sensor that you wear on your, you guessed it, ear. Why? It’s more than just a cute name. It is the first wearable to monitor your core body temperature in real time. This is important as your core body temperature is an indicator for detecting various health issues. Whether it’s worth wearing an earable at all times is a separate question.
It doesn’t only monitor your code body temperature, but can also act as a hearing-aid. The team also sees potential to measure your vitals as well, such as heart rate, pulse oximetry and also EEG. Like many other wearables, the device uses Bluetooth to transmit data to smart devices. The team sees the size of the device only getting smaller as 3D-printing technology improves. Either way, wearers of Earables look like they just stepped of the set of Star Trek. 😲

 
As always, check out our blog for more. That’s it for this week.✌️

If you care about the environment, we’ve got some wins for you 👍

This week we’re talking about robotic eels tracking water pollution, building DNA from scratch👨‍🔬, the first floating wind farm💨, and the first solar-powered train ☀️🚆.

ENVIRONMENT . 

Robotic eels vs water pollution
We have certainly measured water pollution before. But what about measuring water pollution with a robotic eel? Researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology 🇨🇭 and other institutions created a swimming machine that emulates an eel’s undulating motion. The researchers believe this type of robot measures pollution levels faster and more effectively than other methods. The undulating motion is actually better than propeller-based robots because propellers can kick up mud and disturb aquatic life, resulting in compromised data.
As the eel robot swims it sends information back to a remote computer in real-time. Even better, the robot can be programmed to swim towards more and more contaminated water, effective for finding sources of pollution. Nothing like using nature as an inspiration to help protect nature. 🌊👍

LIFE .

DNA built from scratch, full genome likely built by end of year? 😲
Forget modifying the DNA code, what about building DNA completely from scratch? Jef Boeke at New York University leads an international team of 11 labs to “rewrite” the yeast genome. The intention is that in the short term they could insert human-made DNA into living cells, possibly providing a treatment for diseases. In the long-term? Possibly creating new organisms. As one scientist cautioned, “It’s not only a science project. It’s an ethical and moral and theological proposal of significant proportions.”
Rewriting the yeast genome won’t be easy, requiring millions of DNA letters to be altered, added, and deleted. For this reason, they have split up the task between 11 labs spread throughout four continents. They are already one-third of the way through. In fact, they aim to have the rest of the yeast genome built by the end of the year! Let’s see…

(More) ENVIRONMENT .

The world’s first floating wind turbines in 🇬🇧
Floating wind turbines are now a reality, thanks to the company Stratoil (🇳🇴) & UK government subsidies. The floating turbines will be situated 15 miles from the coast of Scotland, to make a floating farm called Hywind. It’s expected that the floating turbines will produce enough power for 20,000 homes. The cost of wind power has seen a significant drop in recent years and may soon be cheaper than nuclear power. The UK has been a leading nation in the deployment of wind power as an alternative energy source.
They have the world’s largest turbines in the Irish Sea off the north-west of England. Guess who has the biggest collection of wind power on the planet? The UK. In fact, at the moment the collective capacity of all of the UK’s wind turbines can power 4.3 million homes. And they’re looking to double their wind capacity by 2020. 🇬🇧💨

TRANSPORTATION .

More firsts, the first solar-powered train 🇮🇳
The first solar-powered train started moving this past week, along a 12.5-mile route near Delhi, India. The train isn’t fully solar-powered, it is a diesel-electric hybrid, but it is certainly a step in the right direction. Its solar-powered battery can power the train by itself for up to 72 hours. While Indian Railways has used embedded solar-panels since 2015, they only used the solar power to power interior lights and air conditioning. Now, the entire train can run from solar power, again, for up to 72 hours.
The UK is also looking to get their trains off the grid, and power them from the sun. However, the UK project would likely source its solar power from elsewhere, not driectly mounted to the trains themselves. That makes the Indian solar-powered trains that much more unique, panels on the train itself is powering the train forward. 🚆+☀️ is pretty futuristic. 👍
As always, check out our blog for more. That’s it for this week.✌️

Talk to the hand ✋, my smart-wearable-glove hand 😎

This week we’re talking about smart gloves that translate sign language! 🙋, Moon-mining in 2020 🌕, the top programming languages of 2017 💻, and new, cool, skin-like wearable tech!

WEARABLES . 

Smart gloves can translate sign language 👏
This glove can not only translate sign language into text but also control objects in virtual reality. Best part? It was built for less than $100. This is some sci-fi fantasy stuff that is happening right here, right now. The only downside, they named the device “The Language of Glove”. Yikes. Clearly they were more focused on building bleeding edge, affordable tech, than a catchy name. Who knows, maybe people can get around to saying “Hey, can I try your Language of Glove?”
The team from UC San Diego made sure the parts were off-the-shelf, low-cost, and easy to manufacture. The glove’s highly stretchable materials allow the wearer to do a wide range of hand gestures, with the glove currently programmed to translate American Sign Language (ASL) into readable text. The scientists see even wider adoption in virtual reality, for purposes ranging from entertainment to education. One example, doctors could practice procedures in a virtual environment much more effectively if they were to ‘virtually operate’ with their hands, rather than a joystick or controller.

SPACE .

Mining on the Moon as soon as 2020 🌕
Forget 2020 for a second, the first commercial moon landing could launch before December 2017. The private spaceflight company Moon Express is planning three missions to the moon by the end of 2020. Their end goal is to create a robotic outpost on the South Pole of the Moon. This outpost would house permanent robots, mining the pole for water and minerals.
How? Their MX-1E robotic lander would hitch a ride on a separate company’s – Rocket Lab – experimental rocket called the Electron. That’s teamwork. Their plan is to develop a series of robotic landers and vehicles, moving from the MX-1E, to the MX-2, MX-5, and MX-9. The 2017 launch is their submission to the Google Lunar X Prize. The winner is the first team to land a privately funded spacecraft on the Moon, travel 500 meters, and transmit back high-definition video and images. Their reward? $20 million, and a being part of history. 🚩🌕

SOFTWARE .

Top Programming Languages of 2017 announced 💻🏆
IEEE Spectrum has come out with their fourth interactive ranking of the top programming languages. And there has been some movement since last year. Python is No.1, jumping up two places from last year. The next in the top four (in order) are C, Java, and C++. At fifth, there is C# edging out R now in the No. 6 spot. Apple’s Swift is now in the top ten at No. 10, with Objective-C dropping to 26th place!
IEEE Spectrum notes that no new languages have entered the top rankings, a repeat of the previous year. They speculate that we may “have entered a period of consolidation in coding”. To save any of you from having to click the link, the remaining top 10 languages are Javascript (No. 7), PHP (No. 8) and Google’s Go (No.9). Interesting to see languages that are both decades-old and a few years young make the list!

WEARABLES (Again) .

Skin-like wearables, more cool than creepy 🔥
Researchers at the University of Tokyo have developed a ‘breathable vital signs sensor’ that is in the category of ‘e-skin devices’. The e-skin device is essentially an extremely thin strip consisting of a polymer, polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) and the gold layer, that sticks easily to the skin.
If you feel like you’ve seen or heard of similar devices, electronic films that adhere to the skin, you certainly have. But what’s new about this sensor is that past e-skin devices haven’t been considered safe for long-term use. The new sensor is breathable, no longer dealing with problems of irritation and inflammation caused to blocked airflow around the skin. Their trials found no inflammation after patients wore the e-skin device for a week. The end-goal? Real-time monitoring of your vital signs, such as heart rate and blood pressure, in a manner that is comfortable and safe. 👍⚕️
As always, check out our blog for more. That’s it for this week.✌️

😒 Your phone has a battery?… that’s really 2016

This week we’re talking about electric bike-sharing programs 🚲⚡, a new phone that doesn’t need a battery 😒, cryptocurrency using more energy than small nations, and an AR device that screws in like a light bulb. Now let’s get lit… 💡

TRANSPORTATION . 

Electric bike-sharing in Denmark, it’s moving 🚲⚡
Bike-sharing programs have spread from San Francisco to Shanghai, but what about newly emerging electric bike-sharing programs? In Copenhagen, their Bycyklen program is really growing in ridership, from 169,000 in 2015 to 933,000 last year. The program started in 2013 and took two years to reach maturity, installing all docking stations and delivering all bicycles.
The bikes themselves are pretty fancy (and expensive), with their own tablet computer embedded into specially designed handlebars. Users can use the tablet to log in to unlock the bicycle, manage account information, navigate to their destination, and find nearby docking stations. A similar program exists in Madrid, but E-bike sharing hasn’t hit the same level of success in the U.S. One possible reason for this may be that many in the U.S. enjoy bike-sharing programs for the exercise. However, not as much for mixing up their daily commute.

TECHNOLOGY .

The first cellphone makes calls without a battery 📱
You may have seen wireless charging in some Starbucks here and there. Offering free charging like that is pretty cool. But what’s even cooler, is not having to worry about charging at all. Would a battery-free phone mean no more hunchback iPhones? Maybe. University of Washington researchers has the best clue of how close we are to this dream world.
They invented a cell phone that requires no batteries, as the phone harvests microwatts of power from ambient radio signals and light. The technology has been detailed in a paper published this month, called Proceedings of the Association for Computing Machinery on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies. You can’t play games or listen to music, but their phone is able to make Skype calls within a limited distance, depending on whether the phone is powered by radio signals or light. 😮👏

CRYPTOCURRENCY .

Electricity requirements of crypto surpass a few nations ⚡⚡
Power use in mining Ethereum and Bitcoin has surged so dramatically that the collective amount of electricity now surpasses that of a small country. Bitcoin alone has an energy consumption on par with Turkmenistan. Turkmenistan 🇹🇲 isn’t even that small of a country, let alone energy-consumer, ranking 81st in the global energy consumption. Here’s another way to put this energy consumption in context. The latest Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index states that the average Bitcoin transaction requires 163-kilowatt hours (KWh) of electricity, enough to power the average U.S. household for about five and a half days.
Ethereum, on the other hand, has an average energy consumption that is roughly a third of Bitcoin, or 49Kwh. Though even Ethereum energy consumption nears the entire energy consumption of Moldova 🇲🇩 (120th globally). Essentially, Bitcoin & Ethereum may be doing some incredible things for the world, but they don’t seem to be that energy efficient. Hard to imagine Venmo or Chase Quickpay reaching the same energy consumption rates per transaction, but that’s comparing apples and oranges.

AR .

Just screw in your AR like a light bulb? 💡
Ok, this one’s a prototype so don’t pull your wallet out just yet. With all the devices the consumer device world wants to sell you, where do you put them all? Well, an interesting project from the researchers at the Future Interfaces Group at Carnegie Mellon University has come up with an AR-device powered by a lightbulb socket. That means no more competing for desk-space or outlets for that matter. It’s called Desktopography.
Robert Xiao is a graduate student leading the project and explains that it uses a small projector, depth sensor, and computer to project images onto surfaces. The two interesting parts, it screws into a lightbulb socket – possibly a desk-lamp or overhead light – and the augmented reality projections can move to stay out of objects already on your desk. One interesting example involved projecting an interactive calculator on a desk. Unfortunately, he estimates that it could take 5 years to make it a real commercial product, but with the rate of progress in the field, it could be a lot sooner.
As always, check out our blog for more. That’s it for this week.✌️

😢 This wearable’s sole purpose in life is to tell you how drunk you are ⌚🍺

This week we’re talking about alcohol wearables 🍺🛑, wearables taking your blood 💉, AI better than doctors at matching IVF embryos?, and tracking money 💸  in Macau with facial recognition.

WEARABLES . 

Telling you to stop drinking ⌚🍺
A lot of people believe that wearables should monitor how drunk you are. In fact, three different wearable technologies monitor your alcohol levels. And all three wearables rely on the fact that alcohol will be transmitting through your skin. Unfortunately, it takes around 45 minutes for this process to happen naturally. So for wearables like BACtrack, it will track your drinking habits but it can’t do so in real time.
The most interesting wearable is definitely PROOF. It also relies on skin-based testing and is also a wristband device, but it can actually do real-time BAC testing! They use special enzyme sensors, that have the drawback of needing a change from time to time to maintain the wearable’s accuracy. Though PROOF seems to be way ahead of the competition in other ways as well. It shares with you an estimated time for you to get sober. It also has given off blinking lights and vibrations when you’ve hit your preferred drinking limit. Before you start thinking that you can delegate being responsible to your wristwatch, both BACtrack and PROOF won’t be coming out with their products until later this year.

(More) WEARABLES .

Let your wearable take your blood? 💉
Inventors and technologists are once again finding inspiration from nature. While you may not like mosquitos, a team of scientists from the University of Calgary thinks you may want a bite from their “e-Mosquito”. The e-Mosquito is a device for diabetics that periodically samples your blood to monitor your blood glucose levels. The automatic nature of the device is much less tedious and painful than the most common method today, simple fingerpicking. While earlier versions of the e-Mosquito were nearly the size of a deck of cards, their latest prototype has been reduced to the size of a standard watch.
The device can be preprogrammed to take samples at various times of the day, and even sends the results wirelessly to a doctor’s office or smartphone. Unfortunately, they are still in the midst of further developing the prototype, not to mention getting regulatory approval from the FDA, so don’t expect to be using these devices in the next year. ⌚💉

A.I. .

Now better at matching successful IVF embryos ⚕️
In a recent newsletter, we discussed a study where the application of artificial intelligence to brain scans has led to very successful early diagnoses of autism in children. Now just this past week, a recent study revealed the impressive success of applying AI to the in vitro fertilization (IVF) process. In the study, embryologists faced off against an artificial intelligence to see which group was more successful at selecting viable embryos. You know where this is going…
For those wondering, the study didn’t experiment with human embryos but bovine ones. Though that doesn’t mean that our future children won’t have their own embryos selected by a computer. Returning to the study, the AI first trained on embryos to see which embryos were viable or defective. Next, the embryologists and AI were given 48 examples of bovine embryos. The study revealed that the AI ‘won’. But disappointingly, the study didn’t reveal by how much. The team is now moving on to testing the AI on human embryos… 👶

LAW & ORDER .

ATMs 💸 in Macau requiring facial recognition 😲
Facial recognition technology is now being used to address issues of money laundering and ‘capital flight’ (massive outflows of money from a country which can push down the value of its currency). The Macau government has been implementing a variety of solutions to tackle these problems, such as limiting ATM withdrawal amounts and banning gambling via telephone. But what is notable about the adoption of facial recognition software is both its scale and privacy implications.
All ATMs in Macau that have been outfitted with facial recognition technology require cardholders to use the software. Cardholders stand for six seconds as their face is analyzed to verify their identity. Where in the U.S. or Europe this may be considered a major privacy debate, the Macau program has rolled out with little protest. And, yes, if this feels straight out of the Minority Report, that’s because the future really is here.
As always, check out our blog for more. That’s it for this week.✌️